Promenade

Irish Web Awards 2009: The Skinny, the Bloated and the Bonkers

eoghan@cluas.com — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

A pet peeve of mine is bloated websites: site with pages that are so stuffed with images and widgets that they take too long to download, even on broadband. Over our 10 years of operations CLUAS .com has continually tried to keep things lean and mean when it comes to page size (indeed CLUAS, as far as I am aware, remains Ireland's lightest – and hence fastest – music website).

Back in 2008 I had a good old rant about bloated Irish websites (specifically about Music and Technology blogs). Another indulgent rant is long overdue, this time I've fixed my attention on the winners at the recent 2009 Irish Web Awards. Are the best Irish websites of 2009 a lean and mean bunch, or are they a morbidly obese bunch? Read on...

The table below presents the results of an analysis of all 21 sites that won an award at the Irish web awards in terms their page size as reflected in:

the total size of their home page, and
the total number of files that need to be downloaded (also know as number of "HTTP requests") to create the page.

The 3 colour-coded categories in the table correspond as follows:

"The Skinny": ("Optimal balance of page size and http requests")
The Bloated: ("Just too much going on in terms of page size and http requests")
"The Bonkers": ("Inexcusably massive number of HTTP requests coupled with an utterly obese page size")

The Irish Web Award 2009 winners, categorised by payload

Site	Winner of Irish web award for…	Number of HTTP requests	Total size of page (KB)
The Persuaders	Best Podcaster	9	123 KB
Kildare Street	Best New Web App/Service	11	148 KB
RTE Sport	Best Sports Site	34	167 KB
CLUAS.com	(did not win, just shortlisted)	30	168 KB
Silicon Republic	Best Technology Site	44	217 KB
Count Me Out	Best Social Media Campaign	32	240 KB
Curious Wines	Best eCommerce site	45	266 KB
Talk Irish	Best Education site	40	271 KB
RTE	Most Useful Website	61	295 KB
Entertainment.ie	Best Entertainment Website	91	350 KB
Look and taste	Best Videocaster	35	432 KB
Boards.ie	Best Discussion forum	23	468 KB
Cars Ireland	Best Practice	100	540 KB
Decisions for Heroes	Most Innovative Website	68	708 KB
Nos Mag	An Suíomh Gaeilge is Fear	64	729 KB
Rose Project	Most Accessible Website	44	792 KB
Phantom FM	Best Radio Website	145	560 KB
IDA Ireland	Best Govt. & Council site	175	655 KB
Irish Times	Best Online Publication	151	832 KB
Organic supermarket	Most Beautiful Website	71	1376 KB
Nialler9	Best Music Site	100	1387 KB
Dance Ireland	Best Arts Website	62	2053 KB
Note: The data above is based on visits to these sites on 14 Oct 2009, page size of any site may have changed since then.

Seeing a whole load of data listed in a table is one thing. Presenting it in a chart is another, and can often make it easier to understand what is going on across a diverse set of data. So I plotted the results of each individual website on a chart in an effort to extract some more immediate and meaningful results from this analysis. The chart (see it below, where each dot represents one of the websites) has the number of HTTP request along the X-axis, the total size of the home page on the Y-axis. The general trend of the plotted data (that'll be the blue line rising gently upwards, my Leaving Cert Physics teacher would be proud of me) confirms what you'd expect, i.e. that the greater the number of HTTP requests a web page makes, the larger the size of that web page. However it's also easy to pick out from the chart which sites are skinny (hello to the sites that managed to squeeze into the box way down there in the most bottom left part of the graph) and which are bloated. And then there are those outlying sites which are just just barking when it comes to page size and number of HTTP requests...

Pity your poor browser - and internet connection – if you hit one of these 'bonkers' sites. For these 6 sites we're talking an average payload of 1.17 megabytes of data to be downloaded via an average of 104 HTTP requests!? Take the worst offender in terms of page size – danceireland.ie. Their home page is made up of 2MB of data (I repeat: 2 megabytes) to be downloaded. If you're on an iPhone and visit their home page, this single page will consume 7% of the daily bandwidth your phone company has allocated you (based on the monthly limit of 1GB of data afforded by O2 to iPhone customers in Ireland). One single solitary web page consuming 7% of your daily download allowance? Truly. Madly. Deeply. Bonkers.

The 8 'bloated' award winners? They are only somewhat better than their bonkers brethren. Between them they impose an average payload on visitors of 455 KB of files to be downloaded via an average of 70 HTTP requests.

But it's hats off to the 6 'skinny' sites (that'll be 5 of the 2009 Irish Web Award winners plus gatecrasher CLUAS.com) who all manage to keep their page size to less than 300kb while keeping the number of HTTP requests to less than 50. Between them they average a modest 265 KB of files to be downloaded per page via an average of 31 HTTP requests. Needless to say, thanks to our ongoing dietary efforts, CLUAS is among these 8 skinny sites, and our page size of 168KB means we clock in as the 4th lightest of the 22 sites.

Two concluding pleas:

Plea 1: Could all webmasters run their websites through one of the many free online tools that check the overall size of a page (I recommend the one offered by the WebsiteOptimization.com guys). If comes out at over 500KB get pruning. Remove some heavy images or chunky widgets on your page to get it down to a reasonable size.
Plea 2: Both the size of a webpage - and the number of HTTP requests the page makes - should be standard judging criteria in any web awards. Placing a carrot like that in front of any website owner who aspires to being recognised by his/her peers with an award for their site is one way to help focus minds on this often overlooked but important aspect of user experience, whether the user be connected via broadband or dialup. (...Of course it never crossed my mind that if super light CLUAS.com were ever to be up for consideration of an award with such an additional judging criteria, that our chances might get a bit of a lift...).

CLUAS on final list of nominees for 'Best Irish Music Site'

eoghan@cluas.com — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Last week it was announced that 26 sites were in consideration for the category of "Best Music Site" at the Irish Web Awards 2009, and CLUAS was one of them.

The 26 sites has now been whittled down to 11 and I was pleased to see CLUAS.com is one of them. The full list of sites now in consideration is:

As you can see we are in fine company. The winner will be announced on 10 October at a ceremony in the Radisson SAS Royal Hotel in Dublin. Best of luck to all those who made the final 11.

CLUAS shortlisted for 'Best Irish Music Site'

eoghan@cluas.com — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Yesterday CLUAS was one of the sites shortlisted for the 'Best Music Website' category of the 2009 Irish Web Awards, the winner will be announced on 10 October at a ceremony in the Radission SAS Royal hotel in Dublin. A total of 26 different sites were nominated in the category, the other sites that made the grade along as well as CLUAS are listed below. Best of luck to all concerned!

Making CLUAS a W3C compliant website

eoghan@cluas.com — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:00:00 GMT

While for many surfers the WWW often resembles a modern Wild West where just about anything goes there are - believe it or not - some formal standards in place. The particular standards I'm talking about are for HTML code: how HTML should be used when creating a webpage (and how a browser should interpret HTML and present it on a page). The setting of the standards is overseen by the all important World Wide Web consortium (also know as W3C, which is headed up by Tim Berners Lee, no less than your man who invented the World Wide Web).

Now to be honest, up to about a year ago, CLUAS did not care about these standards and there was not a single page among our thousands that was even close to being compliant. This did not stop me having a begrudging respect for websites that spouted on about their "W3C compliancy". I was after all only too keenly aware that CLUAS would need to overcome a proverbial mountain to enter the hallowed corridors of compliant websites.

All the same, last year I looked into it and I started - slowly - to update our HTML code, with a little change here and minor tweak there, all with a view to making as many as possible of CLUAS.com's thousands of pages compliant. To be honest it was initially just one of those pointless personal challenges you set yourself once in a while, the motivation of which few people would ever understand (and if they ever did understand the motivation they'd doubt your sanity).

The exercise is ongoing however already the result is that already a massive number of pages on CLUAS.com are at last complaint to W3C's "HTML 4.01 Transitional" standard. Basically the vast majority of pages whose address does not end in .aspx are now complaint (for example 73% of last month’s top 100 most visited "non aspx" pages are now compliant).

So what about these non-compliant .aspx web pages? Well these pages are generated using the DotNetNuke content management system we use and just a handful of them are already compliant (to the different "XHTML 1.0 Transitional" standard). However the level of their compliancy will improve in coming months as the next release of DotNetNuke Blog Module (which is used to publish our album and gig reviews, blogs, and interviews) should be fully compliant, meaning in one swoop huge numbers of CLUAS pages will step in the world of compliancy.

So why bother about compliancy? Put simply there are a number of advantages, such as:

File size and loading times are reduced.
Sites are easier to update in terms of content or styling because of the smart structure (i.e. separation of content from styling) that is implicit in W3C compliant websites.
Greater assurance of future proofing your website - if a site obeys established rules, they should continue to work in browsers and devices of the future.
And having a compliant website means the webmaster feels all smug and elitist compared to pitiful other sites that have not clue about the wonders of compliant HTML code.

The gas thing is that while all this effort may result one day in CLUAS.com being a website fully compliant with W3C standards, the next generation of HTML standards for web pages are already in the pipeline. So we may have to start this compliancy effort all over again…

Nailing traffic with 10 years of links

eoghan@cluas.com — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:00:00 GMT

It's common knowledge that securing links from other websites plays a key role in getting your website's pages into major search engines. CLUAS has been steadily attracting links over its 10 year lifetime resulting in a steady stream of people visiting CLUAS via these links and also - more importantly - ensuring we have an excellent ranking in the search engines. For example we have, for years, been the number 1 result for people searching 'Irish indie music' (and bizarrely also for 'Irish Jazz music'). But such searches are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. CLUAS receives a very considerable amount of its traffic from search engines thanks to - literally - thousands of different 'long tail' searches done by users each month.

So why does CLUAS rank above other Irish music websites when it comes to so many search phrases? There is a complicated answer. And a simple answer. The simple answer is: "links, and loads of them". Thanks to something I stumbled upon last week I can now visually demonstrate the "linking success" of CLUAS compared to other similar Irish music sites. I came across a tool made available by "Majestic SEO" (a company offering "Search Engine Optimisation" services) who started to trawl the WWW back in June 2007 and recorded all the links they found. To use their own words they have...:

"...crawled over 96 billion webpages and analyzed almost 697 billion unique URLs and their anchor text to calculate who link to who and with what anchor text."

They allow registered users of their site to compare websites in terms of the number of links they have attracted. The graph below (click on it to see it in higher resolution) shows the number of different domains that the Majestic SEO crew found over the last two years linking to CLUAS and compares it with the links they found for 3 other Irish music sites (Hotpress.com, State.ie and Nialler9.com).

Click to see graph in higher resolution

It is clear from the graph that CLUAS has attracted links from more domains (i.e. websites) than any of the other sites. This massive repository of sites linking to us is, if you ask, me a key signal used by the search engines when they decide to rank CLUAS above other websites. Building such a eco-system of links sure takes time, but we can vouch for the fact that once it is done the impact is considerable (and occasionally surprising...).

CLUAS.com traffic surges after Michael Jackson dies

eoghan@cluas.com — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

There have been numerous media reports of surges in internet traffic once word was out that Michael Jackson had died. For example, the spike in traffic that hit Google was so out of the norm they thought they were being hit with an automated attack.

CLUAS too saw a surge in traffic as soon as word was out that The King of Pop had passed away. In our case this was due to our 2005 article on Michael Jackson's fall from grace ("Michael Jackson: demon or demonised? Or both?") that Aidan Curran authored. It alone was visited a whopping 1190 times last Friday (see graph, the spike you see is for the number of page views the article had on Friday). A huge increase when you consider, according to our web stats service, that in the year before Jacko passed away, this article was visited an average of 8.6 times a day.

Over the weekend the traffic kept flowing to the article, and by Sunday evening it had been visited a total of 1820 times over four days (see table below). This is just another example of how CLUAS.com's focus on optimising its pages for search engines can, when you least expect it, deliver a result.

Visits to Michael Jackson article on CLUAS
Day	*Visits*
Thursday June 25	110
Friday June 26	1190
Saturday June 27	274
Sunday June 28	246
Total	1820

Anatomy of a writers poll... (part 2)

eoghan@cluas.com — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

As promised last week in the first part of the anatomy of our poll to find the top Irish albums released in the last 10 years, you'll find below the albums that were voted for but did not make the top 50. In total there are 86 albums that were voted for but that did not make the final published list of ranked albums. Of these, 5 were voted for by 2 writers, the rest secured a solitary vote.

A quick glance and you can see some acts who were 'penalised' for their productivity in the last decade as their votes, being spread over multiple albums, diluted their rankings and so reduced their prospects of making the final top 50 (e.g. Ann Scott, Redneck Manifesto, Future Kings of Spain, Nina Hynes and Pony Club).

[Aside: I didn't have the time to do a forensic eligibilty check on the albums below so you may come across entries that were not full length albums, or were released before 1999, or are by acts that are not Irish...]

Albums outside the top 50 that secured 2 votes:

Bell X1 - Flock
Crayonsmith - White Wonder
The Dudley Corporation - In Love With The Dudley Corporation
Hybrasil - The Monkey Pole
Super Extra Bonus Party - Super Extra Bonus Party

Albums outside the top 50 that secured 1 vote:

Adebisi Shank - This Is The Album By A Band Called Adebisi Shank
Adrian Crowley - Long Distance Swimmer
Agitated Radio Pilot - World Winding Down
Ann Scott - Poor Horse
Ann Scott - Were Smiling
Bell x1 - Neither am I
Boa Morte - Soon It Will Come Time To Face The World Outside
Cane 141 - Moon Pool
Carly Sings - The Glove Thief
Cathy Davy - Something Ilk
Chequerboard - Penny Black
Ciaran Murphy - Once Upon A Time In Ireland
Damien Dempsey - To Hell or Barbados
Dark Room Notes - We Love You Dark Matter
David Geraghty - Kill Your Darlings
David Kitt - Not Fade Away
Delorentos - In love with Detail
Director - We Thrive On Big Cities
Dirty Beatniks - Feedback
Dublin Guitar Quartet - Deleted Pieces
Duke Special - Songs From The Deep Forest
Frank and Walters - Glass
Future Kings of Spain's Debut album
Future Kings of Spain - Nervousystem
Gamak - We are the way forward
God is an Astronaut - The end of the beginning
Hal - Hal
Headgear - Headgear
Iain Archer - Flood The Tanks
Iarla Ó Lionáird - Invisible Fields
Jape - The monkeys in the zoo have more fun than me
Jimmy Behan - Days are what we live in
Jubilee Allstars - Lights of the City
Juno Falls - Weightless
Katie Kim - Twelve
Kila - Tóg é go Bog é.
Mark Geary - 33 1/3 Grand Street
Martin Finke - Untended Stories
Mic Christoper - Skylarkin
Mick Flannery - White Lies
Mumblin' Deaf Ro - Senór, My Friend
Mundy - 24 Star Hotel
Neosupervital - Neosupervital
Nina Hynes - Staros
Nina Hynes and the Husbands - Really Really Do
Paul O'Reilly - First Thing In The Morning
Pony Club - Family Business
Pony Club - Post Romantic
Pugwash - Jollity
Redneck Manifesto- Cut Off Your Heart From Your Head
Redneck Manifesto - I Am Brazil
Redneck Manifesto - Seven Stabs
Republic of Loose - This Is The Tomb Of The Juice
Robotnik - Pleasant Sqaure
Roisin Murphy - Ruby Blue
Rory Gallagher - Wheels Within Wheels (not eligible)
Si Schroeder - Coping Mechanisms
Skindive - Skindive
Somadrone - Of Pattern and Purpose
Ten Past Seven - Shut Up Your Face
The Aftermath - Friendlier Up Here
The Chalets - Check In
The Devlins - Consent
The Divine Comedy - Absent Friends
The Flaws - Achieving Vagueness
The Frames - The Cost
The Jimmy Cake - Spectre and Crown
The Mighty Stef - The Sins of Sainte Catherine
The Moondogs - Red Fish
The Sleeping Years - Were Becoming Islands One By One
The Swell Season - The Swell Season
The Things - Some Kind of Kick
The Walls - Hi-lo
Tooth - That Corporate Emotion
Turn - Antisocial
Unite Tribe - Enlocari
United Bible Studies - The Shore That Fears The Sea
Warlords of Pez - Warlords of Pez
Whipping Boy - Whipping Boy
Wilt - My Medicine
Woodstars - Life Sparks

CLUAS: the top site for the Cork Music scene?

eoghan@cluas.com — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Perplexingly, CLUAS continues to be Ireland's number one website for jazz music (well, at least in the eyes of Google, Yahoo and Bing). Not happy with just addressing the needs of jazz aficionados, CLUAS has strived to earn it metal stripes and we are now the number 1 website for Irish heavy metal music (according to Google and Bing where CLUAS holds both the 1st & 2nd slots on searches for 'Irish heavy metal music', while chez Yahoo we currently hold the 3rd and 9th spots for the same search).

Now we are on our way to becoming the top website for the Cork Music scene. This, er, radical development is thanks to a new page I published on the site last week without any fanfare. The page brings together links to all articles from the first 10 years of CLUAS that relate to Cork bands in addition to reviews of gigs that took place in Cork. I simply stuck a link to this new page from the main CLUAS page and then around the website I found a few instances of the word 'Cork' and I simply changed them into a link that points to the new Cork specific page. I then sat back and let the search engines do the rest...

A week has passed and already the results are impressive for the major search engines, just see the table below:

Search phrase	Our ranking on Google	Our ranking on Yahoo
cork indie scene	1	2
cork indie bands	1	7
cork indie music	1	not in top 10
cork music scene	4	2

[I also checked our ranking on Microsoft's excellent new search engine Bing but it is not - at the time of writing - throwing up CLUAS as a result for any of the above searches. I expect that to change in the next week or two].

To be honest I was not surprised at this quick result. For years I have been honing CLUAS so that it is optimised for search engines and, indeed, a very significant proportion of our traffic comes from search engines. In time I expect this new page to attract a healthy and steady number of new people to the site who are interested in Cork music, and if even a fraction of them become repeat visitors, and maybe even join the CLUAS writing team, it will have been worth the effort.

Anatomy of a writers poll... (part 1)

eoghan@cluas.com — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The CLUAS writers poll to find the best Irish releases of the last 10 years has, as I expected, sparked off quite a bit of commentary (I particularly enjoyed The People's Republic of Cork forums and the comments section of Jim Carroll's On The Record blog).

No matter what one makes of its results I can say it was a considerable, but worthwile, effort to pull the poll together. It was worth that effort alone to see the poll results reveal (definitively of course) that 2001-2002 was the vintage period for Irish music in the last 10 years. For those of you enjoyed the number-crunching that delivered such a conclusion here below are some more numbers on the poll:

35 writers cast a vote in the poll
9 of these writers were "CLUAS Alumni" who haven't written anything for the site in over 5 years but were active in our first half decade. The remaining 26 writers who voted only got published on CLUAS for the first time in the last 5 years.
A total of 280 votes were cast, meaning...
...each voter cast a preference for an average of 8 albums (no writer voted for less than 3 albums, nor for more than 10)
Approx 130 different albums were voted for.
55 albums secured votes from 2 or more writers
30 albums were voted by just 2 writers, therefore...
25 albums were voted by at least 3 writers.
9 acts managed to get two albums into the list and they are The Divine Comedy, The Frames, Simple Kid, David Kitt, Cathal Coughlan, David Holmes, U2, The Tycho Brahe and JJ72).
Since its inception 40 albums have been shortlisted for the Choice Music Prize. Of these, 27 secured at least one vote in the poll but only 11 made the top 50.
There was only one point seperating the no. 1 and no. 2 albums in the poll!

Next week, in the second part of this 'poll anatomy', I'll publish the list of albums that were outside the top 50, all 80+ of them.

2001 to 2002 - a vintage period for Irish music?

eoghan@cluas.com — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

There was one thing I was conscious of when I opened the polling booths for the CLUAS writers to vote for their top Irish albums of the last decade - the possibility that the final results could be biased towards releases from more recent years, considering more recently albums could well be to the fore of a writer's mind when casting their votes.

The first chart below however testifies that the CLUAS writers are not such a fickle bunch. It shows the breakdown - by year of release - of the CLUAS writers' top 50 Irish albums of the last 10 years and it is encouraging to see their choices are nicely spread across the full decade (although memories apparently don't stretch too well back to 1999, with only one fin de siécle album making the top 50...).

One thing that is striking in the above chart is 2003, which saw the release of more albums in the top 50 than any other year. Before rushing to the conclusion that 2003 was, therefore, a vintage year for Irish music I thought it'd be instructive to check the average ranking in the top 50 of albums released in a given year (see chart below).

First up, it shows that 2004 does not appear to have set the writers on fire in terms of memorable releases - the five 2004 releases had a low average ranking of 38 in the top 50. The other end of the scale reveals that, while 2003 may have produced the highest number of albums in the top 50, the average ranking of the 2003 albums (8 albums with an average ranking of 25.3) was lower than the releases of 2001 (3 albums with an average ranking of 16.7) and 2002 (5 albums with an average ranking of 18.2).

Conclusion? It is clear that, without any shadow of even a micro-doubt, the real vintage period for Irish music in the last decade was 2001-2002. So that's one discussion laid to rest then (until someone asks a different 35 people for their fave Irish releases of the last 10 years and get a completely different answer...)

Annex 1: The albums in the top 50 released in 2001 and 2002, i.e. the "vintage period":

Year	Artist	Album	Ranking
2002	Damien Rice	O	3
2002	Cathal Coughlan	The Sky's Awful Blue	13
2002	JJ72	I To Sky	34
2001	The Frames	For The Birds	1
2001	Ash	Free All Angels	5
2001	David Kitt	The Big Romance	16
2001	Divine Comedy	Regeneration	25
2001	Snow Patrol	When It's All Over...	44

Annex 2: The albums in the top 50 released in 2004, i.e. the poorest performing year in terms of rankings:

Artist	Album	Ranking
U2	How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb	29
The Tychonaut	Love Life	35
Alphastates	Made from Sand	38
Damien Dempsey	Seize the Day	39
Waiting Room	Catering For Headphones	49